HOW STRANGE!

Death, the Greatest Teacher

HOW strange it is that with someone’s death, a throbbing life is blotted out all of a sudden! A smiling face is extinguished in a second, as if it were even more valueless than a bit of dust!

A soul, with all its hopes and dreams, is suddenly removed completely from sight, as if its hopes and dreams had no reality at all! Life is enormously meaningful, but death appears to make it meaningless. No matter how free human beings seem to be, they are utterly helpless in the face of death!

Every day, innumerable people enter through the door of death. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people set off from their homes but on the way to their destination they are caught by God’s angels, who take them to the stage of the Hereafter, instead of to where they wanted to go.

Every person has built in their mind an entire world full of hopes and desires. They imagine they are advancing towards the world of their hopes; that they are walking in the direction of the ‘tomorrow’ of their dreams. But very soon they realize that they are heading, not to the world of hopes, but, rather, to the world of God, towards the Hereafter. People are simply unaware of where they are heading and where they will arrive.

People generally give their all for the sake of their children. But before they can see and rejoice in their children’s future, death drags them off to their own future—the eternal Hereafter—for which they had made no preparation at all. People build magnificent houses, hoping to live there in comfort, but even before they can enter their dream-houses, death grabs them away. People struggle to become as economically rich as possible, thinking that this will carry them to the pinnacle of honour and progress, but very soon they learn that what awaits them is just a cold, silent grave.

For human beings, their desires and dreams are very dear, but death snatches all these in a trice! If we were to remain aware of our impending death, we would never go astray. The secret of a successful life is to agree to live within one’s limits, and for this purpose, death is the greatest teacher.